Simulated Space Travel
In the New Hayden Sphere

[American Museum of Natural History/Permanent Installation]
No more old-fashioned star-shows at the Hayden Planetarium. Gone is the old projector, even the old Art Deco detailing of the much beloved old building.

In its place is an immense new white globe, the Hayden Sphere, resting on three great pylons in the immense glass box that is the amazing new Rose Center for Earth & Space.

It is good that the sphere has such strong supports, for it weighs four-million pounds. Actually, this works out to 2,000 tons, dry weight, but it sounds more impressive with superlatives.

And superlatives are entirely in order, for the Hayden Sphere and the Rose Center are going to weigh considerably more, once thousands of tourists, New Yorkers, and school-kids begin making the rounds of Outer Space—after its official opening on Saturday, February 19.

Dr. Ellen V. Futter, President of the American Museum of Natural History, is fully justified in her belief that the Center and the Sphere will soon become one of the major attractions in Manhattan.

This belief is enthusiastically shared by the Rose Family, many other donors, both private and public, and movers & shakers in the city.

Not only is there the Frederick Phineas & Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth and Space, but there are also the Harriet and Robert Heilbrunn Cosmic Pathway and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Hall of the Universe.

Not to overlook the remarkably designed David S. and Ruth L. Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth. This is adjacent to the Center and opened last June. It has since proved a great hit, both with the passing public and really serious students, old and young.

On first impression, the entire ensemble outdoes any theme-park park installation, in terms of both design and content. But it is more than just a tourist-magnet or a learning-enhancement for grammar and high-school students.

As President Futter and colleagues such as Neil de Grasse Tyson make clear, the Center is already Plugged into the Universe. The American Museum has from the outset been a major center of expeditions, explorations, experiments, research, and interpretation.

The new Hayden is in contact with all the major outposts of space exploration. New discoveries can be almost instantly shared with visitors to the Center, as well as with schools all over the United States.

The genial Dr. Tyson is both an astrophysicist and the Director of the Hayden Planetarium. He told the press-corps that he had first become interested in what lies beyond our ozone-layer as a school-kid coming to the old Planetarium.

Kids and their parents are going to love the two shows in the Hayden Sphere. They are highly theatrical, but beyond anything you can experience in theatres, live or cinematic, thanks to remarkable computer software and ingenious design.

Large elevators zoom you up to the top level of the Sphere. In the Holding-Area, you are treated to a fascinating introduction to Space and its Exploration.

Inside the circular theatre, leaning back in super-comfort, you will feel your seats begin to vibrate, as a low rumble suggests we are beginning a journey far beyond our own Solar System.

Film-star Tom Hanks narrates our Space Adventure—called "Passport To the Universe"—with friendly urgency. We are going to make astonishing discoveries—as our earth, our own Milky Way, and even previously unknown star-systems recede from us in the utter vastness of Space.

Yes, it does make you—and me—feel absolutely insignificant. As the one-of-a-kind Zeiss Mark IX Star Projector rises out of the center of the arena, you will experience the night sky as you have never seen it before. Even with the old Zeiss projector in the old Planetarium.

Thanks to radio-telescopes, laser technology, and computer-modeling of galaxies and disasters in Outer Space that cannot be seen by telescopes, you will see some absolutely astonishing things.

Frightening even, when you realize that Earth has become an infinitely small speck in this continually expanding Universe.

And nowhere along our trajectory into Outer Space do we see where Heaven or Paradise might be located. This may well be—as for stars billions of light-years away—only detectable by computer-modeling? [Or Death.]

The new technologies aren't going to resolve any conflicts between Science & Religion any time soon.

The level below "Passport" features Jodie Foster and The Big Bang. It all happened so fast, infinities of eons ago, that it's no wonder this show is over so quickly. But it's very dramatic. It may, however, give Creationists second-thoughts.

Leaving the Sphere, we walk down the gently spiraling Cosmic Pathway, where one step can equal millions—or was it billions?—of light-years.

On the floor below the Sphere are a number of interactive displays which encourage visitors to learn more about our planet and its place in space and time. These are better than video-games! And better for you!

All kinds of awards should go this year to architect James Stewart Polshek and designer Ralph Appelbaum. They have devised an Eighth Wonder.

There is a special book for the new center and its varied attractions, but I was not one of the fortunate reporters to be given one. Nonetheless, the cover looked quite attractive.

There will be all kinds of earthbound and inter-planetary souvenirs and publications available in the new museum shop. No aspect of educational and tourist merchandising has been overlooked. Including new snack facilities especially appealing to younger visitors. There will even be indoor parking, including spaces for school-buses.

For a Sneak Preview of the Tom Hanks-hosted Space-Show, check out this website: http://www.1m1.com/passport.htm

For general information, especially about hours, ticket-prices, and group tours, try: www.amnh.org

Would Kodachrome and Agfacolor have destroyed the career of Walker Evans? He certainly lived long enough to have created a substantial body of photographic work in color.

From the evidence of the current exhibition at the Met, he saw America, its People, its often astonishing Vernacular Architecture, and its Road & Shop Signage definitively in black-and-white.

Although his personal portraits of poverty-stricken Southern people in the Depression—as with his photos of their homes and ways of living & surviving—were commissioned for a record of social conditions, these men, women, and children stand tall with honesty, openness, and pride.

A single simple white wooden church in a somewhat barren landscape makes a powerful visual—and social and cultural—statement in black-and-white.

But Walker's lens was equally eloquent in the Mean Streets of Manhattan or the steaming, stinking subway cars of New York City.

Some notable images were clearly thought about and studied. But many of Walker's best seem caught on the wing. True, he did set up his camera to snap unseen shots of passersby, catching a series of New Yorkers on the same spot.

But that wonderful image of workers loading a huge electric sign DAMAGED onto a truck is point-and-shoot in its finest hour.

The wall-label doesn't say what this is all about, but I'm certain they must have been removing part of the marquee-sign for the film Damaged Goods," after it had ended its gala NYC run.

Walker had to be there at that exact moment to get such a great shot.

He loved and collected Americana, especially signage on shops and on the highways. He had an eye for the ridiculous and the stylishly naive in the sign-painters' art.

WALKER EVANS—Quizzical African Mask in 1935 MoMA Show.
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In a pendant display downstairs in the African area, the potent black-and-white portraits he made of major masks and other carvings—in a famous 1935 Museum of Modern Art show—demonstrate another aspect of his art as a photographer.

Today, these objects—some of them in the Met's own collections and now displayed with the Walker photos—are photographed in color. And, of course, they look rather different.

Curiously, they have a greater ikonic power in the starkness of black-and-white. Just as color photos of modern slums look a lot more lively than the black-and-white slum photos of Jacob Riess.

Or Evans' photos of Southern Poverty. Not to forget those stark images of Dorothea Lange of similar scenes and people in the Great Depression.

The stark contrasts possible in black-and-white photography can produce an almost clinical coldness which lends itself well to Images of Misery. But the vibrancy of color makes even the most miserable face or scene rather different than it would have been in b&w.

It is interesting to note that Walker Evans owed his initial success to the patronage and friendship of Lincoln Kirstein. This of course opened the doors of MoMA—and many other doors as well—to him.

When he was printing the immense number of photos required for the MoMA African Art Portfolio, he was assisted by the bi-swinging novelist John Cheever. And his association with the novelist James Agee—providing the photos to illustrate Agee's celebrated "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men"—suggest that he was especially well connected with a then still closeted community of Gay artists and intellectuals.

Could Walker Evans have been America's First Great Gay Photographer? Not that his varied subject-matter was so oriented.

Even if you cannot come to the Brooklyn Museum of Art before this impressive exhibition closes, you may well wish to have the handsome companion book for your very own!

Beautifully printed by George Braziller Publishers, its reproductions of the original prints on the walls of the BMA look even larger. They are so stunning that you might want to buy the book in paperback so you could dismantle it and frame your favorite prints.

It will be very difficult to decide which to choose, for most of the images are so very special you could fill every room of your home with them. Just as the BMA has lined the walls of two major galleries with Hiroshige's visions of the area in and around what is today Tokyo.

They are organized in accordance with the special qualities of the four seasons. This helps suggest what urban and rural Japan must have looked like 150 years ago. Before its opening to the West and before modern technology transformed its life and customs.

Edo, as the ruling capital of the Shogunate, was the largest city in the world—in population at least—when Hiroshige was in his prime. Its major architectural complexes were Buddhist and Shinto Temples and the Shogun's Palace. Because the feudal lords who ruled Japan's provinces under the Shoguns had to spend every other year in the capital, they also had lavish establishments.

[This requirement was similar to that of the French Court, where provincial nobles and aristocrats were also obliged to wait upon the Bourbon King. Keeping them at court most of the year prevented them fomenting unrest and uprisings in their home-territories.]

While Hiroshige does depict some interesting examples of noble period architecture, many of his prints are more concerned with vernacular buildings, created for religious, practical, or pleasurable purposes, in often colorful landscapes

Though some of his reds, blues, and greens are subtly muted and shaded, they more often are vivid and bold. One of two of the views on display have been contrasted with the use two different colors on several of the many woodblocks in the printing process.

There is even a special case with all the woodblocks carved for the various colors and design-details of a famed print. The precision of this carving—and the exactness of the printer's registry of each block on the same piece of rice-paper—are amazing.

Hiroshige does depict some elegantly gowned & kimonoed Japanese ladies and gentlemen. But, far more often, his scenes are populated with peasants and ordinary folk. They may be out for a stroll, at leisure, taking part in a festival, or doing their daily work.

Whatever their station, occupation, or diversion at hand, they give us a wonderful pictorial record of life and customs of a vanished kingdom. It looks almost paradisical in these prints.

That is partly because Hiroshige devoted himself to sketching a number of notable & beautiful natural sites in and around Edo. A map accompanies the exhibition and the book.

Some prints show dogged, determined men coming toward the viewer. Expressions are quite vivid. Others are much more non-committal—giving nothing away of inner thoughts or emotions. More often, however, groups of Japanese are seen from a distance, with no distinguishing characteristics aside from costumes, tools, or adornments.

Hiroshige anticipated a striking compositional technique of Victorian stereo-photographers. Very large-seeming objects in the immediate foreground make things in the receding background seem almost three-dimensional.

His print of the Haneda Ferry shows only a bit of the deck planks. On the left margin, the hairy legs of the ferry-man jut into the picture at an angle. His two arms are seen above, pushing in from the top of the frame. They guide a tiller, which disappears out of the left side of the frame. A taut rope, stabilizing the tiller, is stretched almost vertically from this pole to the deck.

The result is that the viewer does not see either the ferry or the ferry-man. But they are somehow very real, just the same.

Some of Hiroshige's unusual ways of looking at people, nature, and human activities are positively Modernist!

He also frequently uses a forced perspective on either the right or the left side of his image. This lends depth and dimension to a flat print as well. His view of small boat-ferries on a canal in front of a long white row of identical narrow warehouses is stunning.

And, on the right margin of the print, in the immediate foreground, stands an elegant but impassive Japanese lady, in Obi and Kimono, holding a black parasol, her back to us. On a piling in front of her a lone bird perches, watching four others circle the boats.

This is such an ingenious and powerful image, it's no wonder it was chosen for the cover of the book!

In one print, dazzling in its apparent simplicity, a group of virtually indistinguishable archers in the distance take aim. At the left margin of the print, right in the viewer's face, is just half of their bold white target, suspended from a slim pole.

The other half of the drum-head-like target is hidden behind the trunk of a framing tree, one branch with needles dipping down into the scene from the center top of the print.

This print depicts the Takata Riding Grounds. Sure enough, there are two tiny horsemen riding in the distance.

But they are even less important than the archers! Even sacred Mount Fuji in the far distance is upstaged by some trees in the middle-ground.

To those who regard non-Christian religions as exercises in pagan superstition, it may come as no surprise to learn that there was a venerable Japanese cult of worship of Mount Fuji. You certainly wouldn't want to do this for Murray Hill, but Fuji, even today, is so majestic and mysterious that it inspires respectful awe.

The Holy Mountain was so revered that its worshippers naturally desired a closer association with it than could be had from viewing it from a distance. Or in a print by Hiroshige.

So, at different times, two smaller versions of Fuji were constructed, so the aged and infirm—among other votaries, including the lazy—could climb at least an approximation of the Real Thing.

Included in Hiroshige's Hundred Views are prints of each of the fake Fujis.

Actually, there are more than one-hundred prints in this impressive series—of which the Brooklyn Museum has a complete collection of the deluxe portfolio. This was last shown in 1986, fifteen years ago,

These remarkable images may have to wait even longer for their next exposure at the BMA. So it's worth making a special trip to this Unknown Borough—which was once the Fourth Largest City in the United States. Before it was forced to become part of a united New York City.

You could make a wonderful day of your expedition. Soon the blossoms will be bursting out in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, right next to the museum. Just down the avenue—Eastern Parkway, actually—is the Art Deco Brooklyn Public Library, with wonderful decor, displays, and manuscripts.

The Great Victory Arch of Grand Army Plaza is almost as impressive as that monument in Paris. But, instead of Emperor Napoleon, in all his egotistic glory, you have a bronze statue of a simple, homely Abraham Lincoln on horseback. But with a stove-pipe hat.

Then there's super cheesecake and brisket at Junior's. And perhaps Baroque Opera or Next Wave cutting-edge choreography at the Brooklyn Academy of Music—BAM!

MERRY MONTH OF MAY—Medieval illustration in Da Costa Book of Hours in Morgan Library.
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There are also some bound-books with quite beautiful original illustrations and colored drawings. The Month of May—in the Da Costa Book of Hours, illuminated in Bruges around 1515, by Simon Bening—is especially charming.

Another charmer is Jacob Hoefnagel's 1613 vision of Orpheus and the Animals.

The delicacy and detail of the carving of individual pieces of Tilman Riemenschneider's sculpture are impressive indeed. As visitors to the new Met Museum show will be able to discover for themselves.

But the tremendous impact of a score or more of these figures as parts of the ensemble of a late medieval altarpiece is almost overwhelming. Unfortunately, there are only two such monumental works extant.

One is in Creglingen, the other in Rothenburg-on-the-Tauber, on the touristic "Romantic Road." Understandably, neither of these historic German cities was prepared to let curators dismantle their altars for exhibition in New York and Washington, DC.

The two have, however, been skillfully photographed for the catalogue and the show. So it is possible to have an idea of how a number the individual sculptures in this exhibition might once have looked, deployed in wonderfully wrought wooden Gothic frameworks.

Many of the pieces on display were long ago dispersed from their original altar settings. Statues in several groups in this show have been reunited for the first time in generations, if not since their complete ensembles were broken up.

Two polychrome Deacons, on loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art, have been paired with two female saints from the Historisches Museum in Frankfurt-am-Main. All four are believed to have been carved for the same altarpiece.

Just as we are now accustomed to seeing classic Greek and Roman statues in the stark white of their natal stone—when once they were colored, so also are some major works of medieval woodcarving, once colored, now to be viewed in the beauties of their native woods.

But, in Riemenschneider's time, it was the fashion to size and prepare wood sculptures and panels-in-relief for a heavy coat of gesso on which gold and silver leaf could be bonded, along with translucent and solid colors, creating richly glowing religious images and scenes.

In the current show, some of Riemenschneider's masterworks have retained most—if not all—of their polychrome enhancements. As these belong to the taste and the period in which the carvings were created, it may have been a mistake for well-intentioned conservators to attempt to return them to their primal state.

They are very beautiful, especially when gold or silver shines beneath a translucent red, blue, or green.

But when these colors have been stripped away, other beauties in modeling and detail are revealed. Riemenschneider knew very well the powers of his unpainted sculpture.

His mastery of voluminous folds of drapery was a show in itself. Together with Riemenschneider's fantastically detailed carving of masses of curling virginal hair, the faces of some early figures seem wan and weak by comparison.

At the outset of this exhibition there is a magnificent small sculpture by Niclaus Gerhaert von Leiden. It shows exactly this concern with the volumes and thrusts of a many-folded medieval gown, skewed at an angle.

The effect is of rich, heavy robes on very thin, even ascetic, figures. This is a style—or mannerism—which Riemenschneider adopted from the earlier Dutch Master.

The viewer's attention is immediately focused on the gown, rather than the face. And this works far better on the native wood than with polychroming.

Portrayal of the Virgin or female saints with such full gowns, often held high in front by a hand, was a reverent allusion to the pregnancy of the Virgin Mary. Women's dress fashions in the late medieval period also imitated this sculptural style.

Riemenschneider's work was by no means limited to the creation of altarpieces. So some of the more powerful devotional figures—commissioned for family chapels or private prayers—stand alone, without any need for lacy Gothic traceries or golden shrines to frame them.

Riemenschneider's mastery as a sculptor is all the more remarkable because he could work as well in stone as in wood. These are two quite different mediums, requiring some different tools and skills, though the basics and the detailings of Riemenschneider's works in either medium are not that different.

He did, however, choose to work in sandstone and alabaster, which are much easier to carve than marble or granite. At the end of the exhibition, there is a small display of the kinds of tools he must have used to create his masterpieces.

Personal Disclosure Footnote:
I have a very special remembrance of Tilman Riemenschneider, and not only for his sculpture. When I was teaching in West Germany in the late 1950s, I decided to use my free time to photograph outstanding examples of medieval sculpture in wood and in stone by such masters as Veit Stoss and Riemenschneider.

In Nuremberg, I discovered treasures by both—even though this historic city and its churches were still rebuilding after horrendous Allied bombing raids. Veit Stoss's magnificent Maria im Rosenhag—suspended in an historic sanctuary—is a truly monumental work.

On reaching Creglingen in my blue-beetle Volkswagen—on my way to find the famous Riemenschneider altarpiece and its sheltering church—my car was suddenly struck on the driver's side by a wild motorcyclist.

He may have seen my American Forces license-plates, but something about my car certainly had incensed him. I was jolted to a halt. He fell to the cobblestone street, with his cycle on top of him.

The police were on the spot in an instant. They recognized him as an old and unreconstructed Nazi, so I was not presumed at fault. On his handbars was a chrome motto: Hals und Beinbruch.

This is an old German boastful toast, the equivalent of our Break a Leg!

Unfortunately, that is exactly what he had done. And the misadventure almost ruined my joy at beholding at last the great Riemenschneider altar of Creglingen.

The catalogue looks beautiful. But, alas, I'm not on the list of press-people who are given catalogues. So I can only tell you it has 352 pages, with 124 color plates and 152 b-&-w images. It costs $65 in hardcover and $35 softbound.

It looks well worth owning, even if only to impress friends who haven't seen this exhibition. I'm told Met Museum catalogues are less expensive bought in its own shops than in outside bookstores. I don't know what the deal may be at Amazon.com.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art/Closing May 7]
After Cleopatra VII and Mark Antony were defeated at the Battle of Actium, Egyptian funerary customs began to change in some interesting and important aspects.

Before the extinction of the Greek Ptolemaic Dynasty—with Cleopatra the last of her line—mummies of dead royals, nobles, and people of substance had facial masks or cases which were traditional representations of their sex and class. These are now almost clichés in museum gift-shop souvenirs.

The influence of Greek arts & culture—including dress, jewelry, decoration, and styles of painting and sculpting—had spread around the Mediterranean, making a special impression among the upper classes in Egypt. When Egypt became a Roman Province—a special estate of the Emperor—some of the older traditions were gradually transformed by Greek and Roman styles and customs.

Painted wooden panels began to be inserted into the delicate mummy wrappings around the facial areas. Initially, these faces had a generalized quality, but gradually the panels developed into portraiture which is quite individualized.

In some early and very elaborate masks—which cover the sides and the top of the wrapped mummy as well—faces are modeled or painted to resemble men and women, not hieratic types.

One of these now on view at the Met uses both the Greek alphabet and Egyptian hieroglyphics for its messages and incantations.

This extensive and impressively mounted exhibition includes photos, maps, and diagrams which help explain where the many of these masks, mummies, and artifacts were buried. And when.

The Egyptian practice of mummification and tomb-burial continued through the reigns of over 35 Roman Emperors, coming to a close around 300 AD.

Even those prosperous folk who made Egypt their home—but who were not native Egyptians—seem to have adopted not only the funeral customs but also the religion and the gods.

A small votive statue of the Hawk God Horus shows him in Roman armor, enthroned like the Emperor himself. A surviving head of Zeus or Jupiter has the ram's horns of the Egyptian God Ammon curving through his curly locks.

Both Greeks and Romans found in the gods of other cultures similarities to their own, and so incorporated the qualities of both deities in one image.

Many of the finest of the Greek-style portraits are rendered in encaustic, that is: pigment mixed with beeswax. This technique at its most challenging involves hot wax and color, but the painter had to work very rapidly before the mixture hardened.

One once lovely portrait of a woman has been partially ruined over the right eye by an attempt in modern times to meddle with the encaustic.

There are over 70 mummy portraits in this exhibition, as well as actually mummies, a few surviving mummy shrouds, and a number of sculptures and artifacts which relate to the portraits or the burials.

Shrouds usually had images of the goddesses Isis and Nephthys protecting the body at the sides, with an image of the God Osiris covering the face. Later, Osiris morphed into a portrait of the deceased.

The mummy portraits are displayed in a progression of rooms which suggests the sequence of Imperial Rulers over this 300-year-period. This also helps explain the gradual changes in painting styles, as well as the styles in dress, hair, and adornments.

Greek and Roman statues were often painted originally, but only traces of color remain on some survivals. That bleached museum whiteness is the work of sun and weather over the centuries.

So these mummy portraits offer a much more accurate idea of how people actually looked and dressed. But they are important not only as a testimony to customs and habits, but also as examples of Greek and Roman painting, little of which has survived.

In Classic Greece, there were two great repositories of art. Paintings were preserved in the Pinakothek, while sculptures were displayed in the Glyptothek. Obviously, stone has survived the centuries much better than painting-grounds of fabric, leather, wood, or matted fiber.

Many of the mummy portraits are so distinctive, so skillfully detailed, that you may think as you look at them that these are people you would really like to know.

That is quite a testimony to the special talents—even genius—or some of these unknown portrait-painters.

For a long time after the first portraits came to light, they were not perceived as art at all, but only as interesting burial artifacts.

Once again, it is worth noting that Cleopatra was not a Black African Queen. Although the known images of this tragic monarch are rendered in the traditional Egyptian manner—a style which has suggested to some that all the Pharaohs were Black—Cleopatra was a descendant of the great Greek, Ptolemy.

Her ancestor, the founder of the Egyptian Ptolemaic Dynasty, was a general of Alexander the Great, who gave him Egypt to govern. On Alexander's death, the Ptolemys were on their way to greatness. Their final chapter has been magnificently recreated by Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra. Bernard Shaw captured the queen at the outset of her reign in Caesar and Cleopatra.

Studying some of the especially noble mummy portraits of Greco-Egyptian women in the current exhibition, you may have some idea of how the historic Cleopatra might have looked.

Also Worth Noting:

In the last two decades of Wall Street stock-market booming—and of zooming costs-of-living all over Manhattan and the Boroughs, it's now hard to believe that only 25 years ago, the entire City of New York was on the verge of bankruptcy.

In 1973, I was able to buy a handsome Upper East Side apartment for what are now the yearly maintenance costs of ones higher up in the building—the ones with Central Park Views. I still look out, low down and behind, on the Toilets of the Rich. But the value of the flat has increased almost fifteen-fold.

But at that time, prosperous people were actually fleeing New York, seeking more stable communities, no doubt. But every great city has had its ups and downs over the years and centuries.

No great harbor city like New York can ever die. Even if its shipping and cruises have dwindled to naught.

Even, if like Hamburg, it's virtually obliterated by saturation-bombing. Great cities survive, come back, thrive. How could people have lost confidence in New York City back in 1973?

But they did. And it was a close call. Today, all that seems forgotten. Or perhaps some of the newly minted millionaires were only toddlers or embryos then?

DROP DEAD, NEW YORK!—Cartoon of Executioner Gerald Ford with Head of Miss Liberty.

Amazing—the power of our Collective Forgetteries.

Rich young brokers get richer. While struggling artist and actor-friends are paying $1,200 monthly for decaying rooms in condemned housing on the Lower East Side. It isn't right. Or sound economics.

This bubble of inflated values and costs has to break soon. Or have we lost all contact with Reality—as it used to be?

It might be a sobering reminder of our near-collapse a generation ago to have a look at the compact new show over on Central Park West.

This is installed along the walls of the second-floor corridor. There are some relevant objects and documents in standing cases, but the most potent visuals are editorial and political cartoons, photographs, posters, and quotes mounted on the walls.

Most New Yorkers who lived through those dark days and months of fiscal crisis will never forget that tabloid headline, brusquely quoting President Gerald Ford's response to the City's plea for help with its backlogged debt-service payments: DROP DEAD!

In fact, the graphic signature of the current show is Mark Gotbaum's grisly labor-newspaper cartoon: Ford, as a Medieval Executioner, holds a bloody axe and Miss Liberty's severed head.

Thanks to the intervention of major bankers, insurers, and brokers, MAC was formed to restructure debt, borrow time, restore confidence in city government, and reorganize the way City Hall conducted business.

At the time, this was widely hailed as unexpected civic altruism. Felix Rohatyn, as the Man of the Hour, deserved all the credit he was given for snatching the city back from the brink.

But the Manhattan Financial Chieftains were not about to cede control of the city's affairs and purse to politicians in Albany. So the Last Minute Rescue was hardly pure altruism.

The beleaguered and underfunded New York Police were aided by a spunky little guy from Texas. H. Ross Perot sent the City a gift of thoroughbred horses: the famed "Tennessee Walkers."

ONE LUMP OR TWO?—1862 Tiffany Sugarbowl in New-York Historical Society's Show of Presentation Silver.

A major casualty, however, was the previously tuition-free City University of New York. Governor Nelson Rockefeller, in return for "saving" CUNY, imposed tuition—which has steadily risen, making it increasingly difficult for potential students from poverty-level families to get the education they deserve. And which would, in turn, benefit all levels of society, not just the fortunate students themselves.